Teaching Kids Psychological, Brain and Nervous System Fitness

Providing Children the Tools for Life as Part of a Solution

I have mentioned in previous articles, that I believe the solution to many of the current ills of our modern society, is to teach the kids, starting early, about their own Nervous System (fight, flight and freeze), physiology, minds and brains, and the mind-body connection.

If only we could provide them, from an early age, all the tools that have been developed in recent years for self-regulation (self-calming), including breathing, meditative, cognitive, and visualization techniques and exercises, and also started teaching them about co-regulation, healthy human relationships and boundaries, the world they create could be a much better place than the one we will otherwise leave for them.

See the books by Louis Weinstock and Claire Wilson for specific ways we can help the children, and in doing so, help ourselves, including the tools we could arm them with:

Book Review: “How the World is Making Our Children Mad, and What to Do About It: A field guide to raising empowered children and growing a more beautiful world"

Book Review: "Grounded: Discovering the Missing Piece in the Puzzle of Children's Behaviour"

One way I see we could improve things is via tweaking the health messages we are bombarding the kids with. In my view, the current messages about diet and exercise being put out by governments, the media and academics, while laudable, are somewhat ill-conceived. This is because they focus exclusively on what we might call “body fitness”, or physiological fitness for the avoidance of heart disease, diabetes, obesity and cancers in later life.

I would make the case that the emphasis could be shifted towards “brain fitness”, or Nervous System or psychological fitness, or that these should be given at least given equal weight in the messaging. My reasoning is as follows.

(i) Without the right mind tools and attitude, most young people will not have the self-discipline or problem solving skills to sustain a body-fit lifestyle. The diet and exercise messages are doomed to fail.

(ii) Many of the body-fit orientated diet and exercise messages may actually be detrimental to brain health. Low fat diets can starve the developing brain of good fuel, for example. Repetitive, monotonous (gym based) exercise routines with limited social quotient do not stimulate the brain to create new neural pathways, unlike constantly learning new dance routines, or walking in new places as part of a social group. Making the body fit whilst starving the brain of stimulation and fuel is not optimal for mental health or prevention of neuro-degenerative disease in later life. A lean body with a flabby brain does not equate to “healthy”!

(iii) On the other hand, we now know that psychological fitness can create body fitness. It has been demonstrated that we can build muscle just by imagining lifting weights, that people with Parkinson’s can improve just by thinking about moving in ways which light up the movement centers of the brain with MRI training, that athletes can control their heart rate with mindfulness, and that the benefits of meditation, visualization, expectation effects, and controlled breathing are now very well established, especially in professional sports.

(iv) Exercising or eating while stressed can undo many of the physical and nutritional benefits, so learning to calm ourselves, and regulate our own Nervous System, is vital for reaping the health rewards of physical activity and diet.

(v) In my experience, if we were to teach mind fitness, then attention to body fitness simply follows naturally anyway.

Unfortunately, as a sweeping generalization, we dot not appear to be providing children with the cognitive behavioural tools [of the type we, as adults, typically only receive ourselves when we have reached enough of a crisis point to have to attend therapy, or start doing the work on ourselves], the positive mental attitude techniques, nor those which tap into the mind-body connection, nor the self-reflective thought processes, which would help them greatly.

Here is our problem, then: who is going to teach and mentor the first cohort of kids to be mind fit, when very few people in government, education, the media or academia know about, or understand, this stuff themselves? How can they teach it, when no-one taught or mentored them either? The same goes for critical, independent, and joined-up thinking, and problem solving, skills.